Onswipe, the New York tech start­up whose mis­sion is to make it “insane­ly easy for a pub­lish­er of any size to make their exist­ing con­tent a beau­ti­ful app-like expe­ri­ence in the brows­er”, is going from strength to strength. It has appoint­ed a new CEO in the per­son of Jon­ty Kelt, erst­while CEO at ecom­merce firm Group Com­merce. As any sea­soned prod­uct man­ag­er can tell you, when a start­up gets busy enough for its founder to seek anoth­er pair of hands to take over the CEO role, it’s hit­ting pay­dirt handsomely.

To the “next level”

Jason Bap­tiste, who co-found­ed Onswipe in 2012, decid­ed the time had come for an extra pair of shoul­ders and relin­quished the role he’d occu­pied since the startup’s launch to Mr. Kelp late last month. Bap­tiste will now con­cen­trate on being the company’s first chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer, where he plans to focus his efforts on evan­ge­liz­ing the platform.

And in case any skep­ti­cal prod­uct man­agers read­ing this are won­der­ing whether investors forced Bap­tiste out of the CEO role, he’s clear that it was entire­ly his idea. The posi­tion was con­firmed by Kelt him­self, who said it’s “always kind of a sen­si­tive moment when the founder either is forced out or rec­og­nizes that they need some help — in this case, it was very much the latter.”

Bap­tiste says he was look­ing for some­one who could just grow the busi­ness to “the next lev­el”, espe­cial­ly since it began mak­ing seri­ous mon­ey from ads ear­ly in 2013; Kelt fits the bill admirably. He can list quite a bit of ad expe­ri­ence on his resume, hav­ing been VP at the Google-owned ad tech firm DoubleClick

From click to swipe

For his part, Bap­tiste wants to con­cen­trate on his strengths – “com­mu­ni­ca­tions, design and mar­ket­ing” – which he hard­ly had a moment to spare on dur­ing his tenure as CEO. Onswipe’s plat­form opti­mizes pub­lish­ers’ web­sites for tablets and touch devices like smart­phones and it lets them run mobile opti­mized ads to boot. With Kelt at the helm, Bap­tiste now intends, he says, “to make the world love Onswipe.”

As for that skep­ti­cal prod­uct man­ag­er, how’s this for a sta­tis­tic: Onswipe now reach­es 25 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors every month on iOS.

Hav­ing recent­ly also appoint­ed a new Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer, this young tech upstart is head­ing sky­wards with gusto.